There are two ways that this problem could show up. The first is that maybe WMS is treating the two basins as a single basin and this is why the basins have the same color.

If you are sure that there are actually 2 basins, there is actually no way available in WMS to control each individual basin's color. WMS stores a list of 20 or so colors internally and sequentially cycles through these colors when determining the color of each basin. Because of this algorithm used to determine colors for each basin and because you cannot change each basin's individual color, you may occasionally have two basins that are immediately next to each other that have the same color.

There are a couple of ways people use to get around this limitation. The first is that you can still display the border between two basins by turning on the display of arcs along the border in your drainage coverage. The second way around this problem is to go to the map module and export your basin polygons to one of several formats. One of the most common formats is the ArcView shapefile format, which can be read into several GIS programs. The basin polygons can then be displayed in another GIS program and most of these programs allow you to change the color of individual polygons.

It would be a nice feature to be able to edit the color of individual basin polygons, so I'll add this to our requested feature list on this forum.

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Thanks for your reply. One of the reasons I'm interested in WMS is because I do not always have access to an ArcView license or personnel to work in ArcView. Having a front end with some GIS capability is a selling point for this software. But it definitely needs some control on colors for reporting purposes.

Is there any way to reset the algorithm so it chooses new colors or edit a file manually or get around the problem within WMS?

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The colors are hard-coded into the WMS code, so there is no way to change them. We are planning on adding the option to edit the basin colors either this month or next month. We'll try to get this feature into WMS 9.0 so you will be able to get it in the next update.

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Dave, I have added this feature to WMS 9.0. This feature will exist in the next update that is posted on the aquaveo.com web site. WMS does not yet save the display settings for individual sub-basins and you cannot turn the display of indivividual sub-basins on and off. These features will be implemented in future versions.